Vice President's Remarks and Q&A at a BC'04 Roundtable in Lansing, Michigan
Finley's All American Restaurant
Lansing, Michigan

12:25 P.M. EDT

THE VICE PRESIDENT: (In progress) -- came home from Europe and the
Pacific, we then had to design our national security strategy to deal
with the problem and the threat the Soviet Union represented. We
created the Department of Defense, created the CIA, created the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, redesigned our military forces, and made
basic changes and put basic policies in place then that were supported
by Republican and Democratic administrations alike then for the next 40
years. We ultimately succeeded. We were able to deter the Soviet
Union from attacking the U.S. You all know the rest of it.

9/11 demonstrated a couple of things. One, that we faced a brand
new threat, that the greatest danger that we have today is the
possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our own
cities, possibly with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent of some
kind -- that the threat to the U.S. in those circumstances could exceed
hundreds of thousands of lives should something like that ever actually
occur. We have to be concerned about it now because we saw what
happened on 9/11 when we lost 3,000 people that morning in New York and
Washington -- Pennsylvania. We saw the damage that could be done to us
by 19 individuals armed with knives and boarding passes, using our own
system against us, in effect. And we know because of developments
after that, people that we've captured and interrogated, the materials
we found in the training camps and so forth that they're doing
everything they can to try to acquire deadlier weapons to use against
us. And there's no doubt in my mind if they ever do acquire that
capability, they'll use it.

The old concepts that worked in the Cold War, such as deterrence,
don't have much bearing when you're talking about the al Qaeda
organization. We could deter the Soviet Union from attacking the U.S.
by putting at risk those things they valued -- the Soviet Union itself
-- so they were never tempted to launch an attack. But the concept of
deterrence simply is irrelevant when you're talking about al Qaeda.
They don't have any piece of real estate there that they value enough
that for us to threaten that would somehow deter them from launching an
attack against the United States.

What came out of the events of 9/11, obviously, was a recognition
that we were at war. And I don't think that recognition had been there
previously. There had been a series of terrorist attacks prior to that
overseas and here in the U.S. We'd seen the first attack on the World
Trade Center, in 1993; the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in '96; the
bombing our of our embassies in East Africa, in '98; and the USS Cole,
in 2000 -- and each of those had been treated as sort of an individual
criminal enterprise. We went after it with the tools of law
enforcement. We didn't really operate as a nation as though we were at
war, even though the al Qaeda had declared war on us. 9/11 changed
that. And I think everybody came to realize then that this was, in
fact, a war, and that we needed new tools and a new strategy to deal
with it.

The response, clearly, was to move to make our defenses much
stronger here at home, to reorganize the federal government, to create
the Department of Homeland Security, pass the Patriot Act so that law
enforcement had the tools they needed to be able to prosecute
terrorists. But we decided obviously that that wasn't enough. Even if
you had a perfect -- that there was no such thing as a perfect
defense. If you did everything you could from a defensive standpoint
and were successful 99 percent of the time, a 1 percent failure rate
could be devastating from the standpoint of the country.

So the President made the decision that we also had to go on
offense, that it wasn't enough for us just to defend America, sort of a
"Fortress America" concept, that, in fact, we had to aggressively go
after the terrorists wherever they might reside, wherever they were
planning to train, to organize -- that that had to be top priority.
And it also meant we had to go after those who sponsored and supported
terror, specifically through what came to be known as the Bush
doctrine. It was a major new departure because previously there had
been a tendency to separate out, or make a distinction, if you will,
between the terrorist themselves and those states that had sponsored or
supported terror. The President decided the night of 9/11 that that
day is over with. Henceforth, we will hold those who sponsor or
support terror just as guilty as the terrorists for the acts they
commit. And that's what we've done.

Obviously, we did it in Afghanistan, taking down the regime,
capturing or killing hundreds of al Qaeda, closing the training camps
where the terrorists had trained to kill Americans -- where some 20,000
terrorists went through in the late 1990s.

In Iraq, of course, a different proposition there, but there we
had, in Saddam Hussein, one of the world's more evil regimes, a man
who'd started two wars, who had previously produced and used weapons of
mass destruction, chemical weapons, and a man who had a long history of
supporting and sponsoring terror. Iraq was carried as a
terror-sponsoring state by the State Department for years and had ample
evidence of that. They were paying $25,000 to the family of suicide
bombers; Abu Nidal was hosted in Baghdad for years; there was a
relationship with al Qaeda -- ample reason for us to want to go in and
do what we felt we had to do. And there, of course, we've accomplished
our results in terms of taking down the old government. Saddam's sons
are dead. He's in jail. And we're now embarked both in Afghanistan
and Iraq in standing up new governments because it's not enough for us
just to go kill terrorists, if you will. You've got to do a certain
amount of that. But you also -- of course, you go after the sponsors
of terror. But then the question, of course, becomes what are you
going to leave behind?

And a key to our strategy and it hasn't gotten as much attention as
it deserves, though, is that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's
absolutely essential for us to be be able to establish democratically
elected, representative governments to replace those governments that
we took down that had previously operated the way Saddam Hussein had
and the Taliban. And that's the business we're in now.

In Afghanistan, we've had considerable success. We've got Hamid
Karzai in place. He's an interim President. The Afghans will hold
elections in early October, the first time in a very, very long time.
They've got a new constitution they wrote, and they've got 10 million
Afghans that have been registered in the last few weeks that will
participate in the election -- a major accomplishment. By the end of
the year, there will be a democratically elected government in place in
Afghanistan; still got a lot of work to do there; still got continuing
security concerns, obviously. But we're working hard, as well, to
train an Afghan national army so they can take over responsibility, do
their own security.

In Iraq, not as far along. We haven't been involved there as
long. It's been about 17 months now since we started in Iraq. But
again, we've got a new interim government stood up. They've been in
office less than three months. But Mr. Allawi will be in the States
this week, at the United Nations. And on Thursday, I together -- along
with Speaker Hastert will preside over a joint session of Congress
where Prime Minister Allawi will come address the American people in a
joint session and among other things, will thank the American people
for what they've done getting rid of Saddam Hussein.

There we've got the interim council established. The Iraqis are
now in control of all of their ministries. They will have elections in
January. That group that gets elected in January will write a
constitution, and then they'll have final national elections by the end
of next year to put in place a democratically elected government in
Iraq. We're also working very hard to stand up Iraqi security forces,
training and equipping the Iraqis so that they'll be able to take on
the fight and be responsible for providing for their own security just
as quickly as possible. And that effort is underway now and has been
underway for many months.

So the strategy going forward, I think, is laid out there for all
to see. I think we have to anticipate that there will continue to be a
high level of violence, both in Iraq and Afghanistan -- partly because
it's important to remember what the strategy of the terrorist is. The
strategy of the terrorist is to use violence, especially against
innocent men, women and children, in order to change the policy of the
government.

And one of the things that the terrorists learned, I think prior to
9/11 -- two lessons, I guess, basically. One was that they could
strike us with relative impunity because they had repeatedly, because
the most we ever did was respond, as I say, to go arrest a few people.
Once we launched a few cruise missiles at some training camps in
Afghanistan. But the organization never paid a serious price for
attacking the United States. And so they thought they could strike us
with impunity.

The other lesson they'd learned was that they believed they could
change our policy if they hit us hard enough -- because they had. They
watched what happened in Mogadishu in '93. We had a battle in
Mogadishu. We lost 19 soldiers and within a matter of weeks, we'd
withdrawn from Somalia. And it was that mind set -- I think they
believed on 9/11 that they were going to get away with it. And of
course, they found when they ran into George Bush and the response of
the American people from 9/11 that that was, indeed, not the case.
They paid a very heavy, heavy price.

But if we think about that background, and you think about where we
are now, I think both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the emphasis on the part
of our adversaries will be to do everything they can to escalate the
level of violence between now and our elections, probably, and their
own elections -- the October elections in Afghanistan, the January
elections in Iraq. And they know that if we're successful in
completing this strategy, we are able to hold free elections, we're
able to put in place democratically elected governments, that their
aspirations to either restore the old regime in Iraq, which I think is
one of the motives of some of the people that are involved there, or to
re-create the kind of operation that has existed under the Taliban in
Afghanistan will fail.

And the key to our strategy long-term is to be able to plant
democratically elected governments in those parts of the world that
have up until now been the breeding ground, if you will, for terrorism
and for the kinds of developments that we've seen in Afghanistan and
Iraq over the years. We have to assume this is going to be a difficult
period ahead, until we can complete that political process. And the
key is to make sure the locals are in the fight, that the Afghans and
the Iraqis are taking on the responsibility, both for governance, as
well as for security. And that's where we're headed with both of those
operations.

Now, let me say just a word about the choice we're going to make on
November 2nd, because I don't believe, frankly, that if -- based on
John Kerry's record in the United States Senate, and based on what he
said during the course of the campaign, I don't believe he would pursue
a strategy as effective as the one the President has selected with
respect to prosecuting the war on terror, and doing it with respect to
the United States.

I look at his track record in terms of his pronouncements on the
war on terror, on Afghanistan, and Iraq during the course of the
campaign. And it does not instill confidence. He started out by
voting for the authorization for the President to use force in Iraq,
then he got into heavy going in the Democratic primaries running for
President, and announced he was an anti-war candidate. Later on, of
course, the subject came up of funding for the troops -- the $87
billion -- once we committed the force to Iraq. And he voted against
that. He and John Edwards both voted against it. There were only four
members of the Senate that voted to commit the troops, but then voted
against giving them the resources they needed once they got there.

Subsequent to that, he was asked here a few weeks ago, knowing all
that he knows now, would he have voted as he did in terms of the
go-to-war authorization, and he said, yes, he would. And then not long
after that, he announced, no, wrong war, wrong place, wrong time -- the
same thing that Howard Dean had said to him, of course, in the
primaries. I noted last night, I saw on the Letterman show, he said he
was glad -- I think was the phrase -- that he had voted against the $87
billion. Nobody has a clear perception of what his policies and his
strategy would be were he in a position to make those fundamental
decisions.

For 20 years in the United States Senate, he consistently voted
against weapons systems, against the strategies pursued by Ronald
Reagan during the Cold War. When I was Secretary of Defense during the
first Gulf War, in Desert Storm, John Kerry voted against using U.S.
force to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. If he'd been the one making the
decisions in 1991, Saddam Hussein would still be in Kuwait. So the
track record it strikes me is abundantly clear. And the thing I worry
about, I think -- this is the fourth President I've worked for, and
I've watched a couple of others up close from the perspective of the
Congress in the 10 years I spent in the House, a senator can be wrong
for 20 years without consequence to the nation. There are a hundred of
them. He's one of 535 votes in the House and Senate. But there's only
one President. And when he makes the decision, that is the deciding
vote. And he ultimately is the one that's charged under our
Constitution with being Commander-in-Chief, with safeguarding the lives
and the fortune of the American people, and obviously with making those
life-and-death decisions about committing U.S. military forces in
order to defend the nation when that's necessary.

We're now seeing -- I think on the other side when you look at his
advisors -- Bill Crowe, for example -- recently commenting about
contemplating the possibility of withdrawal from Iraq -- absolutely the
wrong answer. The fact of the matter is we've made major progress.
We've had significant success given the amount of time we've been at
it. And it's absolutely essential that we continue down this course.
We're not going to get any place if we try to hunker down back inside
the United States and allow terrorism to develop, allow breeding
grounds to produce the kind of people who attacked us on 9/11, or allow
irresponsible states to provide deadly weapons technology to terrorist
organizations. The U.S. has to be actively and aggressively engaged
overseas. And it always, always imposes a heavy burden on our
military, and especially on the families of our military personnel.
And unfortunately, we've suffered losses. You always regret that you
can't bring everybody home in one piece. But it's long-term -- the
cost to the United States of our failure to do what needed to be done
here would be very significant. It's not a choice between sort of
return to the status quo where everything is peace and quiet and all is
well with the world versus what we're doing now. It's what we're doing
now versus what would happen if we had not taken down the government of
Saddam Hussein, if we had not gone in and toppled the Taliban, if we
hadn't gone out and captured or killed as many al Qaeda and we could,
if we weren't out there actively and aggressively dealing with the
problems of nuclear proliferation.

One of the great achievements, I think, of the President's policy
is -- having pursued a very tough course in Afghanistan, and Iraq --
Moammar Ghadafi in Libya watched all of this. And as we launched into
Iraq, he contacted the British and American governments. He got hold
of Tony Blair and George Bush -- he didn't call Kofi Annan and the
United Nations -- and indicated he wanted to discuss his program for
weapons of mass destruction because he was investing millions in
developing nuclear weapons. Five days after we captured Saddam
Hussein, he went public and announced he was going to give up all of
his nuclear materials. And he's done so. It's all locked up now down
at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That would not have happened without the very
tough, aggressive course we followed with respect to Afghanistan and
Iraq. It's the direct result of strong leadership by the President and
the superb performance of the U.S. military. And we're all safer today
because Libya is no longer trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And
that's a lesson that -- I think that we all need to keep in mind as we
think about the alternative.

I think of the alternative, and I guess sort of the bottom-line
judgment I make on John Kerry is -- I don't mean to question his
patriotism. I never have. I've always praised his service in the
military. We do that for anybody who is a veteran. But I question his
judgment. And I fear that he still has sort of a pre-9/11 mind set.
And he hasn't made the transition, if you will, to what is required and
is necessary if we're going to be successful going forward in dealing
with what is a significant threat to the United States in the years
ahead.

So I think the decision on November 2nd is very important. We've
got to get right. It's vital, I think, obviously, for our kids and
grandkids, as well, too. This may, indeed, set the policy, as did that
period right after World War II when we started in and built the
strategies that proceeded during the Cold War. And we're now in that
similar point with respect to the global war on terror, where we are
making decisions that will set in place policies and institutions that
will be with us for the next 30 or 40 years. And it's very important
to get it right.

So with that, let me stop, and I'd be happy to respond to questions
on those subjects or any other subject. I'm going to take my coat
off.

Q Mr. Vice President -- I was a member of United States Marine
Corps, and a Vietnam veteran, and I can tell you I remember what Mr.
Kerry did back in 1971. He said he was exercising his right of freedom
of speech. And I can let you know right now that I will be exercising
my right to free speech on November 2nd in voting for the President and
you for four more years.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

Q The one thing that I'd like to ask you is you've done a lot
of work in the last four years with an emphasis specifically in the VA
system -- and I think it's a 38 percent increase in VA funding, passed
the concurrent receipts. And I don't hear that message being put out
there in the public. The veterans need to know what the President and
the Republican Congress has done for them, instead of to them.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, those are key points. And we've tried to
communicate that. I spoke, for example, at the National Convention of
Disabled American Veterans this year out in Reno, a couple of months
ago. The President addressed the Legion, the VFW, so we've tried to
get the word out as much as we can.

But just a couple of points. You mentioned concurrent receipts.
For those who aren't familiar with that, what it basically means is, it
used to be under the old law if you had a service-connected disability,
for example, and also retired from the military, you could not receive
both your retirement pay and your disability pay. In other words, you
had to off-set your retirement pay by the amount of disability pay you
received. What the President has done -- he's the first President in
history to sign legislation through the Congress now that allows those
with service-connected disabilities to receive both the compensation
for their service-connected disability, as well as their retirement
pay. It's a significant step, but a lot of us thought it was long
overdue.

And the other item, just to give you a measuring standard. The
funding increases for veterans in the first four years of the Bush
administration exceed those of the eight years of the Clinton
administration. So we think we've got a special obligation to our
veterans. I think all Americans believe that. And the President
backed them on that --

Q Thank you for that --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you.

Q Mr. Vice President, I'd like to thank you on behalf of the
sportsmen and women of not only Michigan but the United States for your
continuing support of our outdoor heritage.

I certainly don't have to tell you that we appreciate the
pro-sportsmen administration, probably the most pro-sportsmen
administration since Teddy Roosevelt.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I get in trouble for that every once in a
while. (Laughter.) When I go duck hunting with Nino Scalia, for
example. (Laughter.)

Q Well, I have a question here, under the passing of the latest
farm bill, there were some -- as to the funding of the CRP and the WRP
programs. And we're hearing not only from sportsmen in Michigan, but
across the Midwest and out West, that they want to make sure that
funding is appropriated, or there is enough appropriated funding for
the authorized acreage -- some 39 million acres right now.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay, I don't know the specific status of the
funding, but we can certainly find out for you. No, it's a very
important program.

Q Yes, it's not only vital in Michigan but across the Midwest,
habitat re-establishment across the Midwest.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I hunt pheasant on CRP acreage up in South
Dakota every winter. (Laughter.)

Q Great. Thank you very much.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: All right, we'll check it out and get back to
you.

Q Mr. Vice President, first of all, I would like to thank you
and Mrs. Cheney for being here and listening to some of our issues that
we have.

Some things are a concern -- some of the things that concern me is
health care. A lot of low-income families and most of our middle
class, which we consider the backbone of this country, we pay more for
our health care cost per month than we do for a house. We have our
neighbors like Mexico and Canada that not only can get medicine and
medical treatment cheaper than we do here. I guess, I wonder is there
something that the President and yourself have in mind -- maybe a tax
break for us who work hard for our money, and what --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure. Well, the whole health care area is a
very important one, obviously. It's one we've spent a lot of time on
already. But we obviously will want to make it a priority in a second
term, too.

For years there had been talk, for example, with respect Medicare
-- to take just one area for our senior citizens of the need to update
and modernize Medicare because it was set up in 1965 at a time when
prescription drugs weren't nearly as important as they are today as
part of a total health package. So the President came in on a
situation you could get coverage in Medicare for a heart by-pass
operation, but you couldn't get coverage for prescription drugs that
might allow you to avoid a heart by-pass operation. There had been
talk for years by the other party about trying to reform it and
modernize Medicare, and provide prescription drug benefits. Nothing
happened.

The President ran on that and said we would address it, and he
has. And we passed the most sweeping changes in the Medicare program
since it was set up -- last year. It is now possible for senior
citizens to get a Medicare discount prescription drug card, which
allows them to save 15 percent to 30 percent off their prescriptions.
About 5 million have already enrolled, and in about 15 or 16 months,
the program will be up and running to provide prescription drug
benefits to all 40 million senior citizens in the Medicare program.
And so that's one area.

For other Americans, it turns out, for example, if we look at the
uninsured, about 60 percent of the uninsured in America are -- work in
small businesses, companies that aren't big enough to be able to pay
the benefits that they'd like to be able to pay. And 60 percent -- I
think -- are the total uninsured population, that's pretty important.
And of course, small businesses are to some extent the backbone of our
economy. That's where seven out of 10 new jobs are created. So what
we've proposed there and will continue to pursue is the notion of
association health plans that will allow a group of small businesses to
come together and sort of pool their assets and, in effect, get the
same kind of treatment and discount that a big corporation can get in
terms of the cost of providing health insurance for their employees.

We also have set up health savings accounts which allow people to
save tax-free to cover the cost of their out-of-pocket health care
expenses. And we want to include and add to that the ability of a
small business owner, for example, to get a refundable tax credit to be
able to contribute up to $500 a year to the health savings accounts of
their employees.

We also are proposing a refundable tax credit that will allow
individuals to buy -- either to contribute to their health savings
accounts, low-income individuals, or to use that credit to purchase a
catastrophic health insurance policy that will cover the big items with
respect to a serious illness. A series of steps like that the
President has proposed, that we've already done the Medicare items.
We've already set up the health savings accounts, so we've got more
work to do especially to be of assistance with respect to small
businesses so that they can do a better job of being able to cover
their employees with these types of benefits. So it's important.

The competition has health care proposals they talk about. My view
of those is they really hark back to the past. It involves a much
larger role for the federal government. I'm concerned that it would
add -- about $1.5 trillion is the estimated cost of their program. It
puts the government smack dab in the middle of the relationship between
a patient and medical personnel. And we think it's the wrong way to
go, that there are better ways to handle it.

The other thing I'd mention is medical liability reform. One of
the real crises we've got various places around the country -- and I
was just down in Ohio, I know they've got the problem; we've got it
home in Wyoming -- a lot of places around the country, the medical
liability system the way it's operating today costs about $110 billion
a year out of the economy. It's driving up the cost of malpractice
insurance for doctors.

I was down in New Mexico last week, talked with a woman down there
who is -- has an OB/GYN practice, very successful. But she's had
lawsuits filed against her, which ultimately drove up the cost of her
malpractice insurance. So economically, she's having a difficult time
because the rates have gone so high. My hometown in Wyoming, the rates
for a general practitioner have gone from $40,000 a year to $100,000 a
year for the insurance policy to be able to practice. She said what
she's had to do is to start to screen her patients. And in screening
her patients now, she basically avoids taking high risk patients in
order to protect herself against getting sued. What that means is from
the standpoint of those patients, oftentimes, they're at the lower end
of the economic scale. They haven't had the best prenatal health
care. They are high risk. And they can't get good OB/GYN service
because of the threat to the doctor if she takes them and something
goes wrong during the course of delivery.

We need to badly reform the medical liability system. There are a
lot of examples out there. California has done a pretty good job of
it. We need to place a cap on non-economic damages, and we need to
limit the attorney's fees -- that if we could do that, we could help
hold down the pressures that are leading to increased costs in the
system.

You will not see anybody on the other side pursuing effective
medical liability reform. They don't believe in it. They voted
against it already. We've gotten it through the House of
Representatives. It has been blocked in the Senate, Senators Kerry and
Edwards, primarily because the trial lawyers lobby will not -- has not
supported effective medical liability reform. It's another big issue
in this year's election --

Q (Inaudible.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Why don't you let me answer that so I don't
forget it? (Laughter.)

First of all, I'll be happy to pass along the message. I will see
Mr. Allawi, as I mentioned, on Thursday -- both in the Congress, and
then he'll come to the White House for a meeting with the President and
myself. He has indicated repeatedly that he wants to keep that January
deadline. We agree wholeheartedly. It's important to remember this is
an Iraqi decision. There is now a government of Iraq. They're the
ones that scheduled the elections. We'll do everything to support them
in that effort. But I think you're absolutely right, if there were a
delay or a deferral of the election, it would simply encourage the
terrorists. And we can't allow that to happen. We've got to go full
speed ahead.

And as I say, it's what we've found in Afghanistan, once we set the
deadline and established the procedures, had elections out there, there
was a tremendous outpouring of commitment on the part of the Afghan
people to register. And I'm sure it'll be the same way when it is time
to go vote. You will have a very hard time keeping them away from the
polls when they finally have an opportunity to express their views and
select a government themselves. I think it's an enormously important
event, and we do need to keep to that timetable.

Q (Inaudible.)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we appreciate you being here this
morning. No, the President has made it very clear, and has bent over
backwards to make certain everybody understands that the Muslim
community is not responsible for what transpired on 9/11, or for the
attacks in Madrid, and Casablanca, and Mombassa, and Riyadh, and Bali,
and Jakarta, and Beslan -- that the terrorists are not representative
by any means of those of the Islamic faith. And we need to do
everything we can, and I think traditionally, it has been part of sort
of an American tradition that we judge individuals as individuals --
not based upon the color of their skin, or their ethnicity, or their
religious views. And we do our level best to operate on that basis.

So the President has been very, very careful not to allow the --
sort of a public reaction, if you will, or a governmental -- a set of
governmental policies that single out unfairly individuals simply
because they belong to a particular group. And I think if you look at
his record in that regard, it has been outstanding. He's worked hard
to make certain that we all understand that that's exactly the way he
wants to operate, and that's the way we do.

I get complaints from time to time from a lot of folks about trying
to fly commercial, for example, trying to get on an airplane someplace,
and getting stopped in an airport. I'm probably not the right one to
talk to because I don't have to go through the airport. And Air Force
Two, I'm allowed to get on without being searched. But there's a
certain level of -- I guess, of the burden that's imposed on all of us
by virtue of the need to focus on safety and security here at home and
to counter the possibility of further terrorist attacks. We try hard
to strike a proper balance so that we do what is necessary in order to
secure the county and to safeguard ourselves against further attacks
without doing damage to the basic, fundamental underlying principles
that make this America.

We don't want to adopt a posture or policy that is so onerous, so
burdensome that, in effect, the terrorists win, and destroy the
underlying foundation of our free system without ever launching any
more attacks. There's a balance that has to be struck here, and we try
very hard to do that. I think we get it right most of the time. But I
will admit these are difficult decisions to make, and in terms of how
far we go with respect to imposing policies or procedures that are
designed to safeguard the nation without infringing on people's civil
liberties and individual rights, that's what we pay the President that
magnificent salary for and let him live in the big house. (Laughter.)

Q Mr. Vice President, I appreciate you being here and the
opportunity to visit with you. The Doha Round of the World Trade
Negotiation is ongoing. Our industry is strongly supportive of those
negotiations. We think the proper framework is set up at this time.
We would like not to see it slip back. We want to see the European
Union give up their subsidies. And could you just comment on whether
you think we can work through that process --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. Well, I think we can. The Doha Round is
very important. It got off to a shaky start there in Mexico and so
forth.

Q And Seattle.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Seattle. But I think they are doing better
now. Bob Zoellick, who is our special trade representative, is -- he's
a very tough customer. He's been, I think, a good, effective
negotiator. And we, too, think those issues ought to be addressed
within that context of the Doha round in terms of agricultural policy.
And one of the prime targets has been to change the European policies
that we think are fundamentally unfair in terms of the way they
operate. So I've got a fair degree of confidence that we're going to
be okay there. As I say, I know Mr. Zoellick. I've known him for
some time. And he hasn't got the best bedside manner. (Laughter.) But
I think that's exactly what you need in a trade negotiator. You want a
tough guy.

MR. DOYLE: Mr. Vice President, we have time for one more
question.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay.

Q Mr. Vice President, I'm concerned about the Social Security
being solvent in the next few years, and also I'm looking forward to
your debate on October the 5th.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay. All right, well, with respect to Social
Security, it is an important subject, obviously, going forward. And I
think from the standpoint of those currently retired, drawing benefits,
there's no reason for them to be concerned about the financial solvency
of the system. There is a problem down the road long-term that needs
to be addressed. And I would expect you'll see more discussion or
debate about that in the months and years ahead.

One of the things though that the President has talked about, we
campaigned on last time around, and I think it's something that he'd
want to pursue in a second term, as well, is to explore further this
notion that for younger workers, people just starting out in their '20s
and '30s, they look at the Social Security system and have serious
questions about whether or not there will be anything there 30 or 40
years from now when they get ready to retire. And one of the notions
we've talked about that we think has merit is the idea that -- this
would not effect, as I say, those already retired, or those close to
retirement -- but for younger workers starting out to allow them to
take a portion of their Social Security tax, payroll tax and invest in
a private account, as opposed to personal, be a personal savings
account, as opposed to the way we operate now on the grounds that that
would give a higher rate of return than they would get through the
traditional Social Security system, and would give them something, as
well, that would be theirs. It would belong to them personally. They
could pass it on to their family and it's a very different kind of an
approach than we have today, but it would preserve the option for folks
who want to continue to operate under the old system.

As I say, it's not anything that would kick in immediately or
affect the current set of retirees. But it would be available for,
well, my kids -- 20s, 30s to begin to have a different alternative that
would give them that personal retirement account. That would be, we
think, a significant step forward and help meet some of the financial
requirements that are clearly out there in terms of the solvency of the
system.

Q Thank you very kindly.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. And October 5th should be
interesting. The debates -- I enjoyed the one four years ago with Joe
Lieberman. I thought it was -- I think Joe enjoyed it. We both had
what I thought was a good conversation. And so I think this time
around we've signed up for a 90-minute debate. I think it's October
5th in Cleveland. And so it should be an interesting event.
Presidential debates, obviously, take on somewhat greater
significance. We're just the vice presidents. But it is something I'm
looking forward to.

Again, let me thank all of you for being here this morning. This
is an important election. And I've been involved in a lot of them over
the years, but I can't recall one where I felt the stakes were as
important as they are now, or the decisions. They are big issues.
They ought to be debated in a presidential election. I can't think of
a better setting for us to have these kinds of conversations. And so I
hope you'll keep that in mind on November 2nd, and encourage your
friends and family members to get out there and vote because this is a
big one.